About Me
My dream:
Working and researching as biologist and giving people an understanding for this world and that it is important to protect it. Focus: sharks.
About my life:
In the year 1988, about 1 ½ year after my brother, I was born in Nordenham as a son of a nurse and a dental technician, not far away from the next dyke and oversea harbour. Here in the Butjadinger land I visited the kindergarden and passed the first year of the primary school.
1995 was a far-reaching year. My father helped his brother moving from Berlin to Radolfzell at Lake Constance after he completed his studies. He was sold on the loveliness of the landscape and the sea. So he found a good job and a flat in a small village near Singen and just three months later he moved there. My Mother and we two kids stay in the north untill the end of the school year and enjoyed 12 weeks vacation in summer, after we moved to the south. A time we used for exploring the ambience and sightseeing.
In the village, I completed the primary school and changed to the Zeppelin-Realschule (a secondary school) in Singen.
The busconnections to the city ever since are modestly. The buses are jam-packed with pupils and the journey times are insufferable long. Thus in summer as in winter, I cycled with my bike, often accompanied by some like-minded friends.
During a two week long family vacation on a divingboat at the Mediterranean sea, my father startet his intensive diving career, in what he get us kids into. Thus, very soon, I began to dive in the cold Lake Constance with him. A very challenging diving site, that fascinated me with its almost mystic atmosphere.
The films and adventures of the explorer Jaques Yves Cousteau inspired and impressed me so much, that he became a kind of an idol for me. With his cello (I play it myself since the fourth year of my life), a survey vessel with a harsh but affectionate crew and very lots of diving adventures..., this all inspired me, almost with seven years, to my lifetimedream, to become a marine scientist.
2004 I successfully completed my secondary school level and went on to the HGS, a technical grammar school with the discipline of information technology, in Singen. This may appear unusual in order of my intended career. But nowadays, one often can not get along without profound knowledge in the field of electronic data processing, even in the field of nature studies. Furthermore I was also interested in the functionality of computer systems.
After the successfull completion of my general qualification for university entrance in the year 2007 and two month of a resting period, I startet my professional life.
A temporary job in the big and famous photographic shop in Singen - Foto Wöhrstein - was one of themost formative expreiences of my self-development. And after one year of successfull collaboration, my boss and mentor Mr. Wöhrstein proposed me to do an apprenticeship.
Thus I followed his advice and by my great and intensive training, the awakened and promoted fun in creative photography, my interests in the different, technical details and by the really great and helpful team, I succeeded the apprenticeship with an award as best pupil within less than one and a half year.
In the following year, I was allowed to gain further valuable experiences and in this time of learning and working I gained many important perceptions, that helped me to take the academic studies more seriously and which added to my motivation and my targeted effort. Furthermore, by this, I was able to save some money for the academic studies to be more financially independent.
I could develop onwards my technical understanding in general and especially in photography and I discovered my affection to photography, what could be quite usefull as biologist and natural scientist.
Now it was time to work on my lifetime dream and I matriculated at the University of Konstanz for a bachelorstudies of biology. But the photography is still left for my as an insipring hobby.
Still in the first semester at the university I met a new passion of my life, my love - Carola. Since then, I share my dream and life.
Three years later (end of 2014), as my bachelor examination, I investigated freshwater snails classified under the genus of Bythiospeum of their morphometrical properties, to understand better their dispersal and variability. There is not much known about these snails and it is contended how many species exists in fact. My previous experiences with informatical methods helped me in this case very much. So I got the highest rating for my work. The results will probably be published together with the Staatliches Naturkundemuseum Stuttgart (national natural history museum of Stuttgart), why I won't keep closer to this topic here. But if there are questions about this topic, I would be glad to answer them at every time.
After the exame, I tide over for half a year at Foto Wöhrstein again, to go on with my master studies afterwards.
During my master studies, I participated on lectures of the organismal biology where we tagged bats with tags that measured the heartrate or pressure. Therefore, we were the first group that determined the energy consumption of bats during flight. But as they were experimental tags, our data was not sufficient to publish them. But nevertheless, we gathered valuable knowledge how to perform a bigger project. Further, I participated in a limnological lecture, which was about a small eutroph lake. We investigated different aspects in small groups. I investigated how methane is used by organism as energysource und how it can be tracket in the food web. Third, I participated in a bioinformatical lecture. There, I tried to realize my own project with which small snail shells of the genus of Bythiospeum should be recognized automatically and the user should be informed about the exact species. This may sound trivial, but without statistical and digital methods, it is impossible to deleimitate the species. Actually, the programm seems promising but I' missing some details about special statistics and, to make it more user friendly, image processing and machine learning methods. But I will try to follow up on this project. Additionally, I performed some internships. I was one month each at SCAI of the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt-Augustin (Bonn) and at Nabu Mettnau-Wollmatinger Ried. Towards the end and as a small intermezzo during my masters thesis, I did an internship for about three weeks with Erich Ritter from Sharkschool at the Bahamas. There, we investigated the behavior of sharks and I was able to come very close to the sharks. An awesome experience!
My masters thesis was about omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids and how they influence the growth and reproduction of Daphnia (waterflew). It figured out that these resources interact and I was able to show complementary as well as substitutable effects.
Directly after my examination (2017) I moved with my (meanwhile) fiancé to Bayreuth, because she already got an doctoral position. At the end of this year, we married. Now, I also started with my doctor thesis about nutritional ecology and defenses in waterfleas.
It was always my dream, to finish my academic education as a marine scientist and to give people a better understanding and love to the nature by my future researches and expeditions. Because just what people understand and love, they will protect and preserve.
Particularly sharks and rays are fascinating me. There is still a big lack of knowledge and fear, in this field. Annually, up to 200 million sharks are killed by humans. In contrast, there are 6-10 dead people to average by shark attacks, which are often self-inflicted or even provoked. Sharks are at the end of a very long food chain and are one of the most important member of it. If the sharks die, the whole, global ecosystem will be disturbed strongly. Over this most of the, fortunately, numerous scientists in this field agreed.
I want to contribute to the effective protection of the shark and the sea for further generations.
But the work as a shark-researcher is coupled with extensive research traveling, which is hardly accordable. Thus, I strive for an alternative realization of my dream. I would like to create a research center for complete ecosystems. There, relations of single aspects should be investigated in big macrocosms to deepen our still very superficial understanding of ecosystems. Further, it should provide the possibilityc to bring science and its efforts closer to the public. Additionally, questions on invasion biology (of introduced plants and animals which disturb the natural wildlife) can be investigated here and breeding and conservation programs for organisms which have only little to no chance to survive in their native range can be conducted.